tom,i think i duplicated curtis' experience reading this poem....the moon here in the cities of our country is seldom seen let alone brilliantly...a recent trip to my native place(the stuff of crop fields,water pumping wells,ponderously roaming cattle,and the ones bred for family needs etc...)i found the brilliance again...and with it ,thanks to western disturbances, this ..i felt closer to moon...but life has to be earned...and so i sit under moonless skies....

Yes, that moon last night suddenly appearing through opening in clouds, then disappearing behind clouds all lit up by it, then coming out again, looking down on us who kept going outside to see it again, and again. . . . and still up there this morning before it got light, going down behind the cypress tree. . . .

We get so few moments of truly astonished attention, it seems worth trying to "catch" them once in a while... though of course the gaps in the net (word capture) so often turn out to be larger than those slippery moments (speaking, as we were just now, of love in vain!).